On The Road Ahead by Bill Gates

Even with ghostwriters, Bill Gates isn't much of a writer. Or maybe he just
dictated the book. Whatever the cause, this book is a bit plodding, somewhat
mechanical, as if it were first outlined and then anecdotes and stories
plugged into the appropriate sections.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp
But hey, I read it, and so have many others, so I guess the bottom line is
who cares about adroit verbal gymnastics when the richest man in the world
talks? I wanted to see what he had to say.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp
His main topic is the information superhighway, which he insists is not the
Internet but is instead what the Internet will become when the bandwidth
for video-on-demand is available to all. Whatever.

The Appeteasers
Subtopics are a few scant details about the house he's building (just a home
with a couple unobtrusive experimental ideas, he proclaims); and his view
on the failure of OS/2. This latter was interesting: Bill's plausible point
is that IBM had too many mainframe-related feature requests that diluted the
project's focus. The thing is, it was almost too plausible: if that's the
reason how come I've never heard it before? Could it be that the real
reason is partly MS's fault rather than this conveniently IBM-is-stupid
viewpoint? I just can't shake the feeling that Bill doesn't really believe
his own explanation here, but that's mostly because I'm used to thinking
of him as a coniving businessman who wouldn't hesitate to make up a story
for his book if it would help his business. Maybe he's being straight
and the explanation of the OS/2 debacle really is that simple.

The Main Course
The underlying thread of the book is how the net will change our lives.
He trots out the standard extrapolations, but does a good job of giving
a wide view. He must be a pragmatic sort of fellow, because he gets quite
excited about ideas like the wallet PC and advertising on the net.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp
As a result, the book jumps from new technology ideas (like email that pays
you to read it), which never range outside the scope of making a dollar, to
obviously money-related topics like the financial and technical overviews
of cable vs telephone as the dominant
Internet medium. He includes a chapter on education, seemingly a less
avaricious subject matter, but with the telling title "Education: The
Best Investment".
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp
Overall this book is about the implications for business of the net, and
how the lessons that he's learned from the PC software industry can be
applied to this new revolution. The lessons were as interesting to me as
the book's purported subject matter, as they reflect the same rules that seem
to be behind the new revolution: move fast, use standards, have lunch or
be lunch.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp
The book leaves me convinced that Bill
is one of the few people who really works at foreseeing the future; the
other companies in the business had better work equally hard or they're
going to be trampled.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp
In retrospect, the
most interesting aspect of the book is the very one that brought me to it
in the first place: how does this master of money moves think? Even
as this book tries to be a footloose exploration of the mind-boggling
potentialities of the net, the subtext shouts the answer to this question:
think hard, be scared, and keep a constant focus on making a buck.